Razor-qt Desktop Looks Towards v1.0, Qt 5 & Wayland

Razor-qt is the lightweight Qt-based desktop environment that's come around in mostly the past two years as a much more slim desktop alternative to KDE. It's similar in nature to Xfce but written in Qt rather than GTK. This Qt desktop environment is on initial approach for its next release and further out they are getting excited over Qt 5 and Wayland.

The last update shared on Phoronix about Razor-qt was last September when they were closing in on version 0.5. Jerome Leclanche of the Razor team shared an interesting update on the open-source project last week during FOSDEM 2013.

The Razor-qt philosophy continues to be about lightweight core applications, minimal dependencies, a plug-able modules design, and promotion of third-party applications. Challenges that Razor-qt developers have run into have been the two-party tool-kit system in the Linux world (namely KDE vs. GNOME) and the lack of standalone Qt applications that go without dependencies on KDE.

Leclanche noted that Razor-qt 0.6.0 will be up for release soon. Among planned v0.6.0 features are supporting multiple monitors for the panel, early support for Qt5, task grouping support, support for multiple rows within the panel, a GUI for launching multiple razor-panel instances, and other changes.

Past the upcoming v0.6 release, Razor-qt 1.0 will be further out and the desktop developers are looking at supporting Qt 5.x and Wayland.

The slides going over the FOSDEM presentation can be found here (PDF). For those looking to try out Razor-qt, there's a PPA for Ubuntu/Debian users, AUR packages for Arch Linux, availability on Gentoo through Portage, and for the rest there's the code on GitHub.